Google Announced Ambitious Plan To Run Entirely On Carbon-Free Energy By 2030

14/09/2020

Google has purchased carbon offsets to eliminate the entire “carbon legacy” the company generated in its history.

By that, the company has purchased high-quality carbon offsets to match all of the emissions it ever produced from its data centers and campuses. And that includes the emissions Google generated before it became the first carbon neutral company in 2007.

Google also claims that it's the first in the world to eliminate its carbon legacy.

Carbon offsets are credits for renewable energy that are meant to compensate for emissions generated elsewhere. While those credits support renewable energy, they can only go so far. Not creating emissions at all would be the utmost thing companies can do to keep Earth a sustainable planet for everyone generations to come.

This is why going forward, Google announced one of the most ambitious plans for a tech company to this date.

And that is to run entirely on carbon-free resources by 2030.

What this means, in a decade time, Google plans to no carbon emission at all.

Google's plan to run entirely on carbon-free energy by 2030
Credit: Google

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has published a blog post announcing the search giant’s initiative, and its list of environmental targets to reach by the end of the decade and beyond.

"Not long ago, it was hard to imagine a 24/7 carbon-free electricity supply – at a simple level, the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t shine at night."

"But thanks to trends in technology, and with the right government policies, the promise of 24/7 clean energy will soon be within reach. We think our work can accelerate the availability of clean energy in communities worldwide, and help to solve challenges that have held back its ability to become an around-the-clock source of energy."

Google has also promised to spend more than $5 billion in renewable energy investments with an output of 5GW. That is an equivalent of taking more than one million cars off the road each year. The company also plans to reduce carbon emissions in 500 cities by one gigaton per year by 2030.

"This is far more challenging than the traditional approach of matching energy usage with renewable energy," Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post.

Google’s announcement was welcomed by Greenpeace, whose senior corporate campaigner, Elizabeth Jardim, said that Google is “setting a new high-bar for the sector”, saying that:

“Tech companies were some of the first to set renewable energy goals, and even still, their energy-hungry data centres continued to use huge amounts of fossil fuels, prolonging our collective reliance on dirty energy any time we use the internet. By becoming the first major tech company to commit to power its data centres with carbon-free energy around the clock, Google is setting a new high-bar for the sector: a break-up with fossil fuels altogether."

If Pichai and Google/Alphabet can succeed, it means that anything users are doing through Google's products, including searching for something using Google Search, travelling using Google Maps, sending emails on Gmail, watching videos on YouTube, and so forth, are going to be a 100% powered by renewable and green energy.

To make this happen, the company is aiming to pair all of its data centers and campuses with wind and solar power sources together, and also by increasing its use of battery storage and AI to optimize electricity demand and forecasting.

The "stretch goal," as Pichai described it, will force Google to move beyond the norm the tech industry has set for offsetting carbon emissions from electricity use, and require technological and political breakthroughs to achieve.

"The problem is so immense, many of us need to lead the way and show solutions," Pichai said. "We’re one small player in this but we can set an example."

This is exceptionally true, as analysts estimated, Google will need to buy 15.5 terawatt hours of clean energy by 2030 just to keep meeting its existing 100% renewable power target. And a lot more is needed to meet the company's bold goal of running a 100% carbon-free energy company at its full capacity, 24/7.

In total, this commitment aims to create more than 20,000 new jobs in clean energy and associated industries globally by 2025.